Introducing Shorts

This is to introduce a new format of posts I’m experimenting with. I have many unfinished drafts of posts lying around. When I asked myself why, I came to the conclusion that it’s natural in the writing process to have parallel threads of unfinished ideas¹ However, there’s a certain mixture of joy (and anxiety) associated with periodically releasing your work to a broader audience.

Writing time lies on a spectrum, from long form posts which can take a month or more, to tweets which exist on the time scale of seconds to minutes. I aim to structure these posts by pursuing an in between strategy of releasing shorts that capture the gist of an idea without delving into a lengthier exposition. To stay true to this goal, I’m following a self-imposed restriction to cap the post length to 700 words². The hope is that this length should encourage me to share what I’m reading, building, and thinking about, without aiming for the completeness of a longer post³.

I’ll end with a quote:

“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.” ― Frank Herbert

Footnotes

These threads may morph beyond drafts into longer posts at a later time. However, due to the dual sword of time constraints and general tendencies of staying on the hedonic treadmill of perfection, amateurs like me fall into a writers block. ↩︎
733 words to be precise. I wanted to convey the essence of the post within 5-6 minutes, and assuming an average reading speed of about 130 wpm, this is roughly 715 words. To denote the significance of the constraint I’m imposing I decided to choose a nearby number with magical properties. 733 belongs to a class of numbers called balanced primes, which follow the property of being equidistant from the previous and next primes. It’s conjectured that there are infinitely many balanced primes. ↩︎
That said who knows, maybe enough of these shorts will coagulate around a general theme for me to turn into a longer post :) ↩︎